HCHTech
Well-Known Member
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- Pittsburgh, PA - USA
The other thread about Unifi stuff made me want to ask this question about keeping tabs on your clients' equipment. How are others making sure they know when their clients have a problem? Here's my tale on efforts to get things a bit more organized for my shop:
We use Hostifi, and up until recently primarily used the "Sites Overview" page to show all of our clients' stuff on one page, and used that as our monitoring window. When something showed up as a problem, we would investigate and fix it. The "new & improved" controller pages have removed this useful page (it's still available if you switch back to the "classic" view - albeit a bit buggy), but in reality, it's high time we moved on to a better and more-scalable system. Once we passed 15 or so clients on the controller, it just isn't efficient to use this view as the main way to find out about problems.
So, I've been on a tear recently to streamline and centralize the monitoring of other equipment we have in the field, like Synology NAS units or iDRAC setups for example. To do this, I setup a new "notifications" email address on our domain, and I'm having all of the various notification emails that can be generated by equipment send their notifications to this new email address. I signed up for SMTP2GO to have a common SMTP server to use, and also to standardize the setup across different devices.
Ideally, I'll be able to configure these received emails to create service tickets in our CRM, but step one is getting everything to send their emails to one place, so that's where I am now.
I went through a particularly-frustrating ordeal with Unifi. Originally, the notification emails all went to the "SuperAdmin" user on the controller. Looking at their documentation, it was clear that you couldn't just specify the address you wanted notifications to go to (like, I don't know, every other thing that does this, but you do you, Ubiquiti). You have to create another administrator account. I wasn't keen to give global access rights & such to the notification account, so I deselected the various options that give access, to essentially create a "read only" admin user. Then, I could check the "receive email notifications" box for the notification user and uncheck it from the original superadmin user. So far so good, I thought. But it didn't work.
The first thing I ran into was how to generate a "real" event that would in turn generate a notification email so I could test this setup. Unifi provides a "Send Test Email" button there, but I wanted to see a real alert. I assumed the simplest thing would be to just unplug an access point. I did so, but no email, no event. A bit of googling later and it turns out Ubiquiti has removed this as a notification event because it was apparently "unreliable". I guess people complained about getting spammed with disconnect emails, I don't know. I never had that experience. It seemed to work for me, anyway. So instead of putting in a counter, or control to only notify if it stayed disconnected for X amount of time, they just took it out. Awesome - that would seem to me to be one of the things that I absolutely would want to know to keep my clients up and running. This is Bug #1.
So I settled for the "Network Client Connection Change" setting. Every time a user connects or disconnects, you get a notification. This would be WAY too noisy to use in real life, but for testing, anyway, it should be easy enough to generate an event. I turned it on, signed on a new device, and got a notification email - yea! Except, it went to the original admin address, not to my new notification address. Plus, this setting applies to ALL CLIENTS on the controller - it's not individually settable per client. Not a wonderful surprise. Ticking this box generated between 5 & 10 alerts every minute for my 20 or so clients on the controller. So be careful what you ask for on this one.
After double checking settings, and then more time with google, I gave up and chatted with Hostifi to figure out why the alerts wouldn't change destination.
They had me double check the settings again, everything looked good. After trying a few things that didn't work, they asked me to give more of those admin rights I had taken away from the notification account back. I added them back one at a time and tested the notification each time. After all of the rights had been added back, essentially making my notification account a superadmin, I started getting notification emails. Ugh. Not what I want, but at least it works. I asked "Is that how this is supposed to work?" Answer: "I don't know." It would appear to me that since they have the checkboxes to indicate what level of rights each admin account gets, the answer is obviously "No." This is Bug #2.
I disconnect with the chat after thanking them for their help and expressing my disappointment with the resolution. Then, about 30 seconds later I see the problem: The alerts are going to BOTH addresses, the original superadmin email AND the new notifications (now also superadmin) email. I didn't even try to look at settings anymore, I just chatted back. "Oh yes, that's a bug that has been there since v6.1 (current is v6.4). Notification emails go to ALL admin accounts. You would have thought they might have brought that up somewhere in the hours spent on this project with them. So now I'm stuck with setting up a rule to auto-delete the emails from the original superadmin email, which unfortunately is also used for a lot of other communication. This is Bug #3.
So there are currently 3 Bugs in the notification "system" available to Unifi users, that little old me with only 20 clients on their controller has run into. What do people with way more clients do? This seems a bit unreasonable to me, and it's all Unifi, Hostifi could certainly have saved me time had they known about a couple of those bugs in advance, but I still give them props for sticking with me to solve the problem - well, not solve exactly, but get to a semi-working setup anyway.
We use Hostifi, and up until recently primarily used the "Sites Overview" page to show all of our clients' stuff on one page, and used that as our monitoring window. When something showed up as a problem, we would investigate and fix it. The "new & improved" controller pages have removed this useful page (it's still available if you switch back to the "classic" view - albeit a bit buggy), but in reality, it's high time we moved on to a better and more-scalable system. Once we passed 15 or so clients on the controller, it just isn't efficient to use this view as the main way to find out about problems.
So, I've been on a tear recently to streamline and centralize the monitoring of other equipment we have in the field, like Synology NAS units or iDRAC setups for example. To do this, I setup a new "notifications" email address on our domain, and I'm having all of the various notification emails that can be generated by equipment send their notifications to this new email address. I signed up for SMTP2GO to have a common SMTP server to use, and also to standardize the setup across different devices.
Ideally, I'll be able to configure these received emails to create service tickets in our CRM, but step one is getting everything to send their emails to one place, so that's where I am now.
I went through a particularly-frustrating ordeal with Unifi. Originally, the notification emails all went to the "SuperAdmin" user on the controller. Looking at their documentation, it was clear that you couldn't just specify the address you wanted notifications to go to (like, I don't know, every other thing that does this, but you do you, Ubiquiti). You have to create another administrator account. I wasn't keen to give global access rights & such to the notification account, so I deselected the various options that give access, to essentially create a "read only" admin user. Then, I could check the "receive email notifications" box for the notification user and uncheck it from the original superadmin user. So far so good, I thought. But it didn't work.
The first thing I ran into was how to generate a "real" event that would in turn generate a notification email so I could test this setup. Unifi provides a "Send Test Email" button there, but I wanted to see a real alert. I assumed the simplest thing would be to just unplug an access point. I did so, but no email, no event. A bit of googling later and it turns out Ubiquiti has removed this as a notification event because it was apparently "unreliable". I guess people complained about getting spammed with disconnect emails, I don't know. I never had that experience. It seemed to work for me, anyway. So instead of putting in a counter, or control to only notify if it stayed disconnected for X amount of time, they just took it out. Awesome - that would seem to me to be one of the things that I absolutely would want to know to keep my clients up and running. This is Bug #1.
So I settled for the "Network Client Connection Change" setting. Every time a user connects or disconnects, you get a notification. This would be WAY too noisy to use in real life, but for testing, anyway, it should be easy enough to generate an event. I turned it on, signed on a new device, and got a notification email - yea! Except, it went to the original admin address, not to my new notification address. Plus, this setting applies to ALL CLIENTS on the controller - it's not individually settable per client. Not a wonderful surprise. Ticking this box generated between 5 & 10 alerts every minute for my 20 or so clients on the controller. So be careful what you ask for on this one.
After double checking settings, and then more time with google, I gave up and chatted with Hostifi to figure out why the alerts wouldn't change destination.
They had me double check the settings again, everything looked good. After trying a few things that didn't work, they asked me to give more of those admin rights I had taken away from the notification account back. I added them back one at a time and tested the notification each time. After all of the rights had been added back, essentially making my notification account a superadmin, I started getting notification emails. Ugh. Not what I want, but at least it works. I asked "Is that how this is supposed to work?" Answer: "I don't know." It would appear to me that since they have the checkboxes to indicate what level of rights each admin account gets, the answer is obviously "No." This is Bug #2.
I disconnect with the chat after thanking them for their help and expressing my disappointment with the resolution. Then, about 30 seconds later I see the problem: The alerts are going to BOTH addresses, the original superadmin email AND the new notifications (now also superadmin) email. I didn't even try to look at settings anymore, I just chatted back. "Oh yes, that's a bug that has been there since v6.1 (current is v6.4). Notification emails go to ALL admin accounts. You would have thought they might have brought that up somewhere in the hours spent on this project with them. So now I'm stuck with setting up a rule to auto-delete the emails from the original superadmin email, which unfortunately is also used for a lot of other communication. This is Bug #3.
So there are currently 3 Bugs in the notification "system" available to Unifi users, that little old me with only 20 clients on their controller has run into. What do people with way more clients do? This seems a bit unreasonable to me, and it's all Unifi, Hostifi could certainly have saved me time had they known about a couple of those bugs in advance, but I still give them props for sticking with me to solve the problem - well, not solve exactly, but get to a semi-working setup anyway.
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